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INTRODUCING CASA VIEJA

Casa Vieja is a traditional Spanish village farmhouse, extensively remodelled and modernised. It is

located in the midst of the magic triangle of ancient Moorish cities: Córdoba, Granada and Seville.

The house sleeps 8 in four bedrooms (two with double, two with twin beds), all with bathrooms

en-suite. The house has a fully-equipped kitchen, a laundry-room, sitting-room with wood-burning

stove and a study/dining-room. In the garden there is a terrace with awning and a fully private

8m x 4m pool, a shaded open-air eating area with BBQ and a small additional summer kitchen;

there is also a separate sun-terrace and a wood-fired bread oven. Indoors you will find a large

library and extensive art-collection, and WI-FI on all floors.

Casa Vieja (the Old House) is an ancient Andalusian finca, a village farmhouse with its own more

modern separate guest tower (seen on left above) set in a cluster of courtyard gardens where

orange and lemon trees glow between scarlet sevillana roses, sky-blue plumbago, clouds of

purple bougainvillea, and abundant banks of rosemary, thyme, bay, mint and basil. In late

summer the evenings are fragrant with jasmine and the langorous scent of dama de noche.

Not so long ago, at the end of the day, farm animals used to be led in through the double front

door to the stables in the back yard. In those days the upper floor with its typically low roof served

as a granary – a safe haven for grain from hungry Hispanic rodents. There was a midden where

the roses grow vigorously now.

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The Main House at Casa Vieja is the old finca itself, with the roof raised to make two double

bedrooms upstairs, sharing a bathroom through separate doors. Downstairs is a fully modernised

kitchen with fan oven, gas hob, fridge-freezer and a dishwasher. A capacious store-room serves

the kitchen.

An arch leads through from kitchen to sitting-room, with its wood-burning Jøtul stove for winter

evenings. Through another arch is the study, which also doubles as a dining-room during the two

or three months of the year when the evenings are too chilly for dining outside.

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The house is decorated throughout with the gloriously vivid photographs of local Andalusian life

by my late wife Fay Tresilian and my own eclectic collection of 20th century art. (* see note below)

Returning downstairs, French windows lead out onto a patio with a Moroccan tiled table and

awning in the green and silver stripes of Andalucia.

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Across the courtyard in the lower garden lies the pool-house, a former cow-shed now

immaculately rebuilt to hold the filtration machinery for the pool and a fully-equipped laundry.

The 8 x 4 m swimming pool itself is the centrepiece of the upper courtyard garden, with its

covered outdoor eating area and sun-terrace.

The Guest Tower also stands here: two double-bedded rooms, both en-suite with shower-room

and w.c., the lower room in an authentic Moroccan blue giving directly onto the pool, the upper

room a rich Moroccan orange with lovely views across the valley to the village of La Chica Carlota

beyond.

The Tower also has its own small summer kitchen and a separate poolside w.c. Across the pool,

beyond the covered terrace, is the pride of Casa Vieja, the clay bread oven, wood-fired and ideal

for pizzas, bread-making and summer roasts.

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Floor Plans

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Casa Vieja in History

When the Christians under Ferdinand and Isabella conquered the last of the Moorish strongholds,

the province of Granada in 1492, the ‘reyes catolicos’ immediately went back on their promises of

religious tolerance and banished Jews and the remaining Moors from Andalusia. This left the

province without all its most capable intellectuals, bankers, farmers and artisans. Over the

following centuries Andalusia – once the garden of Spain – gradually degenerated into bandit

country. It was stop this slide into chaos that Andalusia was ‘re-colonised’ in the 18th century, by

the building of garrison towns at 25km intervals along the main road from Seville to Cordoba, and

their repopulation by surplus citizenry from North Germany. Our nearby La Carlota was one of

those towns. Las Pinedas was one of the outlying villages cloned from it: the same basic layout of

two parallel streets with a square and a church on its southern side, albeit on a smaller scale. Casa

Vieja, on the South-Eastern corner of the village is one of the original houses of that ancient

street-plan.

About the Owner

Nicholas Tresilian is an art-historian and broadcaster, one of the founders of Classic fm and a

leading presenter for many years. He spends the winters in Oxford and the summers at Casa Vieja,

where his office-library is off the lower garden. He also travels a lot, and this then frees up Casa

Vieja for rental.